Slowing down `wildly exotic'

Cate Blanchett talks about 3 new films, returning home to work in Sydney theater

December 31, 2006|By The Washington Post

In New York to promote "Notes On a Scandal," one of three current films she's starring in, Australian actress Cate Blanchett spoke about her latest buzz-worthy roles, and the time of year she calls "the real silly season," for its frenzy of Oscar nominations.

Swallowing bites of lunch between answering questions on the telephone, the winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her 2004 performance as Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator" was simultaneously trying to calm her two young children. The children, who could be heard squealing in the background, were jet-lagged after a marathon flight from their home in Sydney.

Such multitasking doesn't seem to faze the 37-year-old Blanchett, who recently made her directorial debut with a revival of Harold Pinter's "A Kind of Alaska," half of a double bill of one-acts at the Sydney Theatre Company. Along with her husband, playwright Andrew Upton, who directed David Mamet's "Reunion," Blanchett will take over the role of co-artistic director of the theater beginning in 2008, allowing herself only three months off each year to pursue outside projects.

Rather than seeing this as a renunciation of film work, however, Blanchett prefers to think of it as a welcome return to normalcy.

"A lot of sane actors only do one job a year anyway," she says, calling the move a reconnection with "the creative community that we're from."

What's more, she's looking forward to settling down and educating her children in one place after a lifestyle she calls "peripatetic to an extraordinary degree," a result of what she estimates must have been one move every five months over the past few years. "It'll be exotic," she jokes of her future sedentary life down under. "It's wildly exotic to me."

An odd sentiment, perhaps, coming from someone who can be seen currently playing a married British high school teacher who has an affair with a 15-year-old student ("Notes On a Scandal"); an American tourist who is accidentally shot while vacationing in Morocco ("Babel"); and a German woman who turns to prostitution in post-World War II Berlin ("The Good German").

Of the three, Blanchett has described the part of Sheba in "Scandal" as "the hardest journey of connection" she has ever had with a character. Part of it was what the actress calls the character's "desire to be exposed," an impulse that goes against the grain of Blanchett's natural desire for privacy. "My problem is I'm not an exhibitionist. That's why I'm always saying I'll give [acting] up. It takes a lot for me to get up in front of other people and do it."

Beyond that, Blanchett was powerfully turned off by the whole idea of a grown woman having sex with a boy. "I think I was surprised at how strongly morally repugnant the whole thing was to me," she says, while careful to add that she doesn't have to identify with a character to take a part. "I'm not an actress who feels that I have to relate the character's experience to my own life, because I think, in the end, that's a very reductive way to think about a character."

Character, in fact, isn't typically the primary thing that draws her to a project. Rather, she says, she's interested in how she can contribute to the work as a whole.

That's largely what persuaded her to take the part of Susan in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel," an invitation she initially resisted because the character spends 95 percent of her screen time moaning and bleeding on the floor of a hut. "It became a bit of a running joke with Alejandro," Blanchett says.

In addition to Blanchett's three movies in theaters, she has three more on the horizon: another pairing her with "Babel" co-star Brad Pitt in director David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a romantic fantasy about a man who is growing younger (Blanchett will join the shoot, already in progress, next month); the part of the Virgin Queen in Shekhar Kapur's "The Golden Age," a reprise of her title role in 1998's "Elizabeth"; and one of several actors playing Bob Dylan--yes, Bob Dylan--in "I'm Not There."

Blanchett admits she misses the luxury of character research. "There's a lot of things which I loved doing--the reading around, the chatting, the long talks late into the evening, which you now can't do. But in the end, I think a lot of that stuff is to stave off anxiety, and I think the more I've done, the less anxious I've become."

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The Personals page was compiled by Kim Profant from Tribune news services and staff reports.